By Shaenon K. Garrity

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Dammit, there are few things more fun to draw than Mell getting assumed into Heaven. This whole sequence just about makes the storyline worthwhile.

Like I said before, when I started this storyline, I didn’t have the idea of Mell getting assumed into Heaven. But once things got underway, I realized that the entire plot was building up to this strip. Thank you, Catholic upbringing I apparently didn’t entirely understand!

This comic is excellent. That is all.

The blocking in the third panel is so weird. It’s dramatic and all, just…weird. Sometimes drawing is hard. And sometimes, or, more accurately, often, I dealt with that difficulty by completely giving up and just drawing whatever seemed to be a good idea.

Drawing Caliban from different angles: also sometimes too hard to do correctly.

Since Iris is based on my friend Laura, Iris’s husband is based on Laura’s husband Dennis. He’s a surgeon, hence the cadavers. I guess, as references go, that’s on the obscure side.

Really, the best part of this strip is Seth leaning in and glaring, for no other reason than that he glares a lot. That and the circle of magic fire.

Helen is mostly concerned about Dave going mad and/or cluelessly wreaking mad-scientist havoc, the latter of which just came to pass. But I’m sure she cares about him and stuff too. Dave’s such a romantic.

If you’re wondering why that column of holy light seems much taller than the ceiling of whatever room this is, then the answer is that Mell is also taking all of Iris’s roof with her. These columns of holy light, for all their glory, are basically the same as your common UFO tractor beam.

In Helen’s defense, this is really one of the most apropos ways to end a storyline that literally takes place over a D&D game. It’s kind of a miracle, really.

Ok now, what is that reaching into Helen’s lab coat, and the clouds of stuff around her? I actually went back weeks to check the last time we saw her, and she and Artie had just dynamited out of something’s gullet. This looks different. Dryer.

Mell was already divinely touched enough, as her previous unfairly acquired boons have told. Will she squander this latest, greatest power-up as quickly as she did the robot army or Dave’s transformer-car? (No, but just barely.)

At this point, I was sure you were going to eventually reveal that Mel was a little bit of a genius and that she had manipulated at least part of the situation towards this end as opposed to it being a last-minute decision… But you didn’t.

Still, maybe she’s simply a “genius” at taking advantage of opportunities rather than planning.

Sure, it’s easy to judge Ariel, but Human Artie wouldn’t think it an entirely straightforward moral decision. (Gerbils, by the way, are about as far from humanity in the Great Chain of Being as humans are from angels.)

Heavenly Assumed,And upwardly she zoomed,My girlfriend!Ariel, we seeHow grossed out she can be!Bye, girlfriend!Now I’m feeling lots of pain and suf-fer-ing,Lost the girl with whom I did the … wild thing!Had a body so warm,Had a physical form,My girlfriend!

Is that what that is? I always thought it was a patch of melted tile that had formed a wave during Mel’s assumption, because of Iris shouting about her tile floor getting damaged when the angel showed up.